Arabic Plural Nouns – Arabic Number of Nouns

Arabic Plural Nouns – Arabic  Number of Nouns

Nouns

Number of Nouns (continued)

Plural Nouns

Plural nouns الْجَمْعُ are nouns that refer to more than two things or persons.

There are two types of plural nouns in Arabic:

• Regular Plural (suffix, grammatically plural)

• Irregular Plural (different stem, grammatically singular)

 

The regular plural is very similar to the dual, it works by adding suffixes to noun stems.

 

The irregular plural, on the other hand, is nasty. This kind of plural does not work by adding suffixes but rather by taking the root letters (called radicals) of the singular noun and applying them into a totally different structure derived from a verbal noun structure. This is why this kind of plural is known as the “broken plural;” because it does not preserve the singular stem . There are many irregular plural structures as this kind of plural is common in Arabic, unfortunately.

 

The regular plural suffixes are two kinds:

• Masculine Plural

• Feminine Plural

Each one of these is inflected for two cases, the nominative (raf”, subject case) and the oblique (nasb & jarr, object case), which is similar to the dual suffix inflection. However, whereas the masculine plural retains nunation in the definite state (like the dual), the feminine plural does not.

 

An important fact to know is that, for many nouns, the same singular noun has multiple plural words of more than one type.

Masculine plural nouns are always masculine and they have only masculine singulars. Feminine plural and irregular plural nouns are always feminine but they can have both masculine and feminine singulars. Irregular plurals can be masculine when they refer to male humans.

 

Masculine Plural Nouns

 

The masculine plural جَمْعُ الْمُذَكَّرِ الْسَّاْلِمُ is used primarily to pluralize participles that refer to more than two male humans or to groups of male and female humans.

 

Masculine plural nouns are identified by their masculine plural ending that is inflected for two cases and two states as follows:

 

 

The masculine plural endings are pronounced at pause except for the final short A vowel, and they are apparent in writing except also for the final short A vowel, which is indicated by an optional diacritic mark.

Example, click on the Arabic word to hear it:

 

The case inflection of the masculine plural (and feminine plural) ending is similar to that of the dual in that it involves only two cases because the nasb and jarr marking is identical.

 

However, masculine plural nouns, like the dual and feminine plural nouns, are not nomina diptota because they have nunation and they are inflected for two cases in all the three states not only in the absolute state like the diptotes.

Initially, in ancient times, the masculine plural suffix was used to pluralize all masculine nouns without distinction, including those referring to nonhumans. However, as the trend of the irregular (broken) plural arose, Arabs began to abandon this suffix and use the irregular plural instead. As they did that, restrictions began to appear on the use of the masculine plural and kept appearing and increasing until the masculine plural finally became restricted to derived nouns referring to male humans, and particularly to participles referring to male humans.

For example, masculine nouns that refer to humans but are not derived from verbs cannot take the masculine plural ending and they are pluralized via the irregular plural. Such nouns are like the following:

 

Derived nouns include verbal nouns, participles (including agent nouns), time and place nouns, and tool nouns.

Verbal nouns are abstract nouns that refer to ideas (e.g. eating, going, helping); they cannot refer to humans, so they cannot take the masculine plural ending unless they are used as male proper names. Time, place, and tool nouns also cannot take the masculine plural ending.

Remains the participles. The participles in Arabic are several categories:

• Active participles

• Emphatic active participles

• Active-participle-like adjectives (agent nouns)

• Passive participles

Nouns belonging to any of these categories can function as agent nouns in addition to their primary function as participles. However, the active-participle-like structures are mostly used as agent nouns in Standard Arabic and rarely as participles; this is why I refer to them often as “the agent nouns.”

Note: if you are not sure what “participles” and “agent nouns” are, the active participles in English are simply adjectives ending with -ing, like a “talking robot” and a “boring movie.” The passive participles are adjectives that look like words after “have” like a “beaten kid” and a “freed prisoner.” Agent nouns are nouns ending with -er, -or or the likes, like “teller,” “liar”, and “conductor.”

The active participle structures are two types, a simple, basic type that is derived from triliteral perfective verbs (form I verbs), and a “meemic” type (begins with a mu- prefix) that is derived from the rest of the verb forms.

The meemic active participles are relatively complex structures that are hard to “break” and remake into irregular plurals (though it is possible to add to them an augmentative tied taa<). This is why those are pluralized primarily via the regular plural suffixes when they refer to male humans (and infrequently via the addition of an augmentative tied taa<).

On the other hand, the non-meemic active participles that are derived from triliteral verbs and refer to male humans have two situations: the ones that are functioning as participles or adjectives take the masculine plural ending, whereas those functioning as non-adjective agent nouns are irregularly pluralized.

Examples, active participles:

All these examples are active participles referring to male humans. The second and third ones are meemic active participles, so these are always pluralized by the addition of the masculine plural ending. However, the first example is non-meemic, so it takes the masculine plural ending only when it is functioning as a participle (when it means “writing,” like in a “writing man”), but it will be irregularly pluralized when it functions as a non-adjective agent noun (when it means “writer”).

Examples on non-meemic active participles functioning as agent nouns: